Shakespeare the Player E-Book

John Southworth

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figure. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. Here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, Shakespeare the Player should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

1The Invisible Man

2Killing the Calf

3The Apprentice

4Admiral’s Man

5The Rose, 1592

6The Player Poet

7Chamberlain’s Man

8He that Plays the King

9The Globe, 1599–1601

10Travelling Man

11King’s Man

12Blackfriars

13The Man Shakespeare

Appendices

ARecollections of Marlowe, Kyd and Peele in Shakespeare’s early plays

BConjectural programme of performances of ‘harey the vi’ at the Rose in 1592/3

CCorrespondences in word, image or thought between Shakespeare’s plays of 1593/4 and the Sonnets

DConjectural doubling plots for Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Troilus and Cressida

Abbreviations

Further Reading

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I am indebted for the data on which my book is based to all those scholars who have toiled so devotedly in the field of research to establish the facts as we presently know them, especially Sir Edmund Chambers, whose six volumes of his Elizabethan Stage and William Shakespeare – from which I quote throughout, as acknowledged in the notes – have provided an invaluable source of reference.

I am likewise indebted to the many libraries that have assisted my studies, and here I want to make special mention of my friends at the Central Ipswich Branch of Suffolk Libraries (my home library) who have been so unfailingly helpful in obtaining the books I have needed through the Inter-Library Loan Scheme, and in meeting my other enquiries.

In the interpretation of the plays, I have learnt as much from the directors and actors I have worked with in productions of the plays down the years as I have from books. My greatest debt of all is to Michael Saint-Denis, Glen Byam Shaw and George Devine, my former teachers at the Old Vic School, to whom the book is dedicated in affectionate memory.

A final word of acknowledgement is due to those libraries and museums that have kindly supplied photographs for the book’s illustrations, and given me permission to reproduce them. Particular acknowledgement is made in the captions. In the few instances where I have been unable to trace the copyright owners, I offer apologies and assurance of future correction, if they will kindly get in touch with me.

John Southworth

Ipswich, November 2002

ONE

The Invisible Man

The eyes that stare blankly out at us from the familiar Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare have little to tell us of the player that he was – or indeed of the man, however we choose to regard him. This should not surprise us. The artist’s depiction of his features must have borne a reasonable likeness or it would not have been passed by Shakespeare’s former fellows, Heminges and Condell, for inclusion in the First Folio of 1623, which they edited; but Droeshout had been only fifteen when Shakespeare died in 1616 and he is unlikely to have known him well, if at all.1 He had probably based his engraving on an earlier portrait or sketch and, if so, whatever life the original may have had was lost in the copying.

But in fairness to Droeshout, we should bear in mind what Heminges and Condell’s purpose had been in commissioning the portrait, which was to embellish a first collected edition of their friend’s plays with an appropriately dignified image of their author. Shakespeare’s renown as player and man of the theatre was not in question – not among those who had known him personally or had seen him perform; his reputation as dramatic poet was yet to be established. Seven years earlier in a bid to secure scholarly recognition for his own dramatic achievements, Ben Jonson had published his plays in a similarly impressive folio volume, which may have prompted Heminges and Condell to do the same for their former fellow. As they explain in their prefatory letters, the Shakespeare folio was intended as both memorial and rescue mission: ‘to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our SHAKESPEARE’; but also because whereas before ‘you [the readers] were abus’d with deverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters, that expos’d them: even those are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect in their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’.2 (The ‘rest’, it should be said, comprised no less than eighteen plays that had never before appeared in print, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, which, but for Heminges and Condell’s initiative in searching out Shakespeare’s manuscripts and the company’s prompt books, might easily, probably would, have been lost for ever.) But, like Jonson, they would also have had a larger end in view. For the paradox is that at the highest point of their achievement in the English dramatic renaissance of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the status of playwrights had never been so low, or plays so little regarded as a literary form.

In 1605, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, the proudly assertive Jonson, committed to prison with George Chapman for their part in the writing of a play called Eastward Ho! that had given offence to the authorities, was so far obliged to bow to the common opinion as to write cringingly to the Earl of Salisbury that the cause of their incarceration – ‘(would I could name some worthier) … is, a (the word irks me that our Fortunes hath necessitated us to so despised a course) a play, my Lord’.3 In founding his now famous Oxford library in the years that followed, Sir Thomas Bodley was insistent on excluding plays from the newly published books that he wished to assemble on its shelves. Writing to the Bodleian’s librarian in 1611/12, Sir Thomas assures him that even if ‘some little profit might be reaped (which God knows is very little) out of some of our playbooks, the benefit thereof will nothing near countervail the harm that the scandal will bring unto the library when it shall be given out that we stuff it full of baggage books …’. In another letter, he puts playbooks in the same category of ephemera as almanacs and proclamations, and refers to them collectively as ‘riff-raffs’. The ‘baggage books’ and ‘riff-raffs’ he thus dismisses as unworthy of attention would have included newly published quarto editions of plays by both Shakespeare and Jonson.4 Even so cultured and frequent a playgoer as the poet John Donne, writing in 1604 or 1605 (years in which Hamlet and Othello were in performance at the Globe), does not even mention Shakespeare’s name or that of any other dramatist in a catalogue of thirty-four works by thirty different authors of the time. As Professor Bentley concludes, ‘he did not consider plays in the category of serious literature’.5 Nor even, it would appear, of literature at all in the usual sense. Though Shakespeare the player, Shakespeare the theatre director and part-owner, would certainly have been known to him, Shakespeare the playwright and dramatic poet was seemingly invisible to him.

Plays of the period were, of course, written to be performed: heard, not read. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth century – and in spite of first Jonson’s, then Heminges and Condell’s, best editorial endeavours – plays continued to be primarily regarded not as books and thus belonging to literature, but as public events in which a story was enacted by means of spoken words and the movement and gestures of actors on a stage to an audience assembled at a particular time and place. They existed temporally – in the two to three hours’ traffic of the stage – not spatially in the way that a book exists and can be handled and shelved. In the theatre, the words were of great importance; at no period of theatrical history have they been of more importance (one went to hear a play, not see it); but they were written by their author to be memorised by actors, and came into their true, intended form only when spoken. We need to remember, too, that Shakespeare was one of those actors; he was writing for himself as a performer as well as for his fellows.

In this respect, the medium in which Shakespeare and other dramatists of the period worked – that of the popular theatre – had continuity with, and was itself an almost unique survival of, the age-old oral culture that had been dominant throughout the Middle Ages. By Shakespeare’s time that popular culture of the harper-poets and itinerant interluders was in rapid disintegration and retreat before the advance of literacy and an increasing availability of printed books;6 a profound shift in the cultural climate that had been in slow, inexorable progress since the fourteenth century but was then brought to a critical stage by more recent religious changes. The Bible – previously reserved as reading matter to a Latin-speaking elite and communicated to an illiterate laity in the form of pictorial images, liturgical ritual and religious drama (all providing an essentially communal experience) – now became in its English translations generally available and subject to individual interpretation. The altar, where an action was performed and a sacrifice offered, gave place in importance to the pulpit, from which the scriptures were read and expounded, and to the chained Bible which people were encouraged to read for themselves – an essentially private act. In the religious compromise effected by the Elizabethan church settlement, the Eucharist survived, but more perhaps as a service to be read than as an action to be done, with the altar replaced by a removable table. The great Corpus Christi cycles of plays, that had survived long enough for Shakespeare to have seen at least one of them at Coventry, did not simply fall out of favour, as was once believed, but were actively suppressed in the interests of the new Protestant orthodoxy by an alliance of secular and ecclesiastical powers that within thirty years of Shakespeare’s death was to close and demolish the theatres.7 So far as the medium of Shakespeare’s expression was concerned, it was an end-game that he and his fellows were playing.

Shakespeare’s plays (and those of his fellow dramatists) were no more written for publication than were the Corpus Christi cycles or later morality plays and interludes, and their survival as texts was to prove just as chancy. Not only were they aimed at performance, rather than publication, but their publication was, in most circumstances, firmly resisted by the companies for which they had been written, including the Chamberlain’s (later, King’s) Men, in which Shakespeare became a sharer. This was because, in the absence of any enforceable copyright other than that of the stationers who printed them, the effect of such publication was to make the texts of the plays freely available for performance by rival companies to the financial loss of those who had commissioned and first performed them. (The plays belonged, not to the author, but to the company. Hence the importance of the playbook, and the book-keeper who was responsible for it.) Nevertheless, as we know, some of Shakespeare’s more popular plays did find their way into print during his lifetime, for the most part in pirated editions, ‘maimed and deformed’, as Heminges and Condell put it, ‘by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters’, and it was in response to that specific situation that they had mounted their rescue mission. In normal circumstances, only when a play was thought to have exhausted its immediate potential in the theatre and had been dropped from the current repertoire was its publication authorised by the company concerned as a disposable capital asset.

But there was another, more telling reason for Shakespeare having remained invisible to so many of his contemporaries. It was not just the ephemerality of the medium in which he worked or the low status accorded to dramatists among other authors, but a deep-seated disdain on the part of the educated and armorial classes of his day, especially the literati among them, for all those who, like himself and his fellows, earned their living in the realm of public entertainment, whether as musicians, actors or playwrights. Quite simply, they were regarded as ‘below the salt’, to be patronised perhaps, but otherwise excluded from respectable society. Here was the real source of that discredit which Bodley believed would reflect upon his new library by the admittance of playbooks – irrespective of their quality. It was embodied in the vagrancy laws of the period where minstrels and players were routinely cited together as ‘rogues and vagabonds’, subject to a whipping if caught on the road without the protection afforded by their acceptance of a nominal, but nonetheless menial, status as servants of the monarch or other great lord. Quite apart from the extreme views of Puritans such as Stubbs and Gosson, for whom acting itself was an offence against God, and players the ‘Devil’s brood’, such attitudes were a commonplace of moderate contemporary opinion.

Once, it may have been otherwise. ‘Plaier’, John de la Casa admits in 1615, ‘was ever the life of dead poesie, and in those times, that Philosophy taught us morall precepts [he means the classical era], these acted the same in publicke showes’; but ‘Player is now a name of contempt, for times corrupt men with vice, and vice is growne to a height of government’; for ‘Players, Poets, and Parasites’, he goes on, ‘doe now in a man joyne hands [in Shakespeare? In Marlowe and Jonson, who at one time had also been players?]; and as Lucifer fell from heaven through pride: these have fallen from credit through folly: so that to chast eares they are as odious as filthy pictures are offensive to modest eyes’.8

Here, perhaps, are those ‘public means which public manners breeds’ referred to by Shakespeare himself in Sonnet 111:

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Or, as Shakespeare’s friend and admirer, John Davies of Hereford, was to bluntly express it in 1603, ‘the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud’.9 The same snobbish disdain for the occupation of player was to fester on until comparatively recent times.

The publication of the First Folio was not only, then, a work of fellowly piety to preserve the text of Shakespeare’s plays and rescue them from the pirates; it also implied a claim for recognition of his genius as a dramatic poet, which, seven years after his death, remained largely unacknowledged. And the engraving Heminges and Condell commissioned Droeshout to make for it was designed to promote a reformed image of Shakespeare as poet and man of letters in circumvention of the contemporary prejudice against him as public entertainer. In the immediate term, their efforts met with only limited success;10 but, as the book found its way into libraries (the earliest reference is to a copy bound by the Bodleian in 1624), it was to light a long fuse to an explosion of scholarly interest and a still-thriving academic industry – all centred, naturally enough, on the plays as literary texts. It is the Droeshout engraving – the only authenticated, contemporary portrait we possess – that has dominated the imagination of the book’s users ever since.

The Droeshout engraving is immediately followed in the First Folio by Ben Jonson’s tribute to his dead colleague and friend and, as if in acknowledgement of its limitations, the reader is urged by him to ‘look/Not on his picture, but his book’.

The memorial bust of Shakespeare in Stratford church (of uncertain date but installed by 1623 at the latest) reinforces this message. (See Plate 2.) Beneath a carving of the now familiar figure, holding a quill in his right hand and resting his left on a sheet of paper, the passer-by is enjoined to stay, and

READIFTHOUCANST,WHOMENVIOUSDEATHHATHPLAST,

WITHINTHISMONUMENTSHAKSPEARE:WITHWHOME,

QUICKNATUREDIDE:WHOSENAMEDOTH DECKYSTOMBE,

FARMORETHENCOST:SIEHALL,YTHEHATHWRITT,

LEAVESLIVINGART,BUTPAGE,TOSERVEHIS WITT.

The inscription is misspelt and over-punctuated; nor does Shakespeare lie ‘with in this monument’ but under the floor of the church some yards away, but its purport is identical to that of Jonson’s epitaph. If we seek the soul of Shakespeare, his ‘living art’, we have nowhere left to look but to the pages of his book; in that time and place, the theatre was not considered an acceptable option.

A long succession of biographers and scholars have since applied this advice in the most literal way by searching the speeches of the fictional characters he created, and the changing themes of his plays, for clues to Shakespeare’s inner, emotional life, or his political and religious opinions. The method is not altogether without interest or value; but the material available to this kind of research is so large and so various that, like the Bible, it can be used selectively to support a multiplicity of contradictory views. So prone is it to subjective bias that all too often the portrait that emerges is found to be more reflective of the researchers’ own preconceptions and prejudices, and of the values and assumptions of the period in which they are writing, than it is of Shakespeare; these look for Shakespeare in the mirror of his book and see only a cloudy image of themselves. In so far as such enquiries proceed from a belief that in writing his plays Shakespeare was primarily engaged in a form of self-expression, rather than in responding to the practical needs of the theatres he served and the changing demands and tastes of the public with whom he was in constant touch in the most intimate way possible – as an actor on the stage – they rest on a fallacious premise. This is not to deny that, like all great poets and writers, Shakespeare was able to mould whatever material came his way to an aesthetic expression of his own unique experience of life and of the world around him, or to do so in words that at their finest and best reach to universal truths; but, by definition, such intuitive insights are not to be found on the surface of his mimetic inventions; and unless we start from a true appreciation of his initial motivations in putting pen to paper, of choosing one theme, one treatment of a theme, one story rather than another, and always with a particular end in view – a play for a specific group of actors to perform in a specific theatre at a specific time that would give pleasure to a specific audience – we go badly astray. In search of his ‘living art’, we discover only a life. And is it really Shakespeare’s?

Those unwilling or unable to accept the plain fact of his profession as player, or its necessary implications, have found ‘evidence’ for a whole series of alternative occupations to fill the so-called ‘lost years’ of his youth and early manhood: schoolmaster, soldier, sailor, butcher, glover, dyer, scrivener, lawyer, barber-surgeon – nothing is too far-fetched if it can serve to postpone the moment of his emergence, ‘exelent in the qualitie he professes’, as player. Others would avoid that moment of truth altogether by attributing the plays to some other contemporary figure considered to be more fitted by birth and education to be their author. Sir Francis Bacon, the earls of Rutland, Derby, Southampton and Oxford have been among the leading contenders for the coveted title. The mystery these set out to solve is of their own making, and the effect of their conjectures merely to muddy the waters of genuine research.

For those who focus on Shakespeare’s poetry in isolation from the dramatic uses to which he put it, there is no mystery; or rather the mystery is seen as endemic to the nature of poetry itself, for as Keats explained in a letter,

… the poetical Character … is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing. It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusts, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated… . A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity – he is continually in and filling some other Body. The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures… .11

For Jorge Luis Borges likewise, ‘There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one’. But Borges situates this quality of ‘negative capability’ not in Shakespeare’s nature as poet, but in his predestined profession as actor. ‘No one’, he goes on to assert,

has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words ‘I am not what I am’.12

And certainly, if part of his peculiar genius as dramatist and poet lay in his capacity to identify with the thoughts and feelings of his characters, and to speak with their voices out of the situations in which he had placed them, that authorial gift cannot have been wholly unconnected with the actor’s ability – which, as a senior member of the leading company of his day, he would also have enjoyed – to identify with the characters he played and to make the words of the playwright his own – which in his case, of course, they normally were. It is this protean component in Shakespeare’s identity that leads so many biographers astray and confuses the critics.

I have said that in publishing the First Folio, Heminges and Condell had planted the seed for an extraordinary, if belated, awakening of scholarly interest in the plays, but the repercussions of it were to spread much further afield.

By the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, the theatre to which he had contributed so greatly was already in decline; in 1642 the playhouses were closed by government decree, and were to remain closed for the nineteen long years of the interregnum, during which time they fell into ruin and were demolished. The companies disbanded and, apart from occasional scratch performances in private houses, makeshift booths or taverns, theatrical activity came to an end. Much that is now obscure and confusing in Shakespeare’s life story is directly attributable to this break in tradition. When, at his restoration in 1660, Charles II licensed the building of two new theatres in the capital, they were of a very different type from those that Shakespeare had known and written for, and his plays had only a fitful presence in them. When occasionally revived, it was usually in ‘improved’ (that is to say, mutilated) versions that their author would have had difficulty in recognising as his own.

It was not, then, principally through the theatre that the great upsurge of interest in, and admiration for, his plays was mediated, but rather through publication of a long and continuing series of revised, annotated editions of the First Folio, to which many of the most learned men of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed. And as more popular versions of these proliferated in the nineteenth century (lacking notes but often lavishly illustrated by imagined scenes from the plays), the ‘book’, to which Jonson had recommended the reader to look rather than its author’s portrait, came to occupy an honoured place beside the Bible in every Victorian home. And the higher that Shakespeare’s reputation as poet and author rose to a pinnacle of universal praise as National Bard, patriotic spokesman, secular prophet and moral exemplar, the more desirable it became to distance him from his theatrical roots and from his occupation as player; while Baconian eccentrics balked at any such connection, these were simply passed over by the mass of biographers as an incidental circumstance of his social situation at a particular period of his life that he was soon to transcend. The tendency was to delay his adoption of the base trade to as late as possible and contrive his retirement from it as early as possible.

In 1908, Thomas Hardy, replying to an appeal for a donation to a Shakespeare memorial that was to take the form of a national theatre, was able to reply that he did not think that Shakespeare

appertains particularly to the theatrical world nowadays, if ever he did. His distinction as a minister of the theatre is infinitesimal beside his distinction as a poet, man of letters, and seer of life, and that his expression of himself was cast in the form of words for actors and not in the form of books to be read was an accident of his social circumstances that he himself despised.13

Recent scholarship, to which we are indebted for more detailed information about the theatrical conditions in which the plays were conceived and first performed than was previously available and, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the restoration to the plays in the theatre of a fuller, more accurate text and a better understanding and respect on the part of actors and directors for Shakespeare’s intentions and methods in writing them, has gone some way to restore the balance. No one today would write about Shakespeare’s plays without paying at least lip service to the theatrical context of their original creation or seek to deny (as Hardy did) its relevance to a more complete appreciation of them as works of art.

But the pattern of late entry to the players’ profession and early retirement from it first set by Shakespeare’s early biographers on the basis of imperfect knowledge and Warwickshire legend persists. And as the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford monument have continued to cast their baleful gaze over subsequent generations of readers, and a great, still burgeoning quantity of academic writing – ranging in quality from the brilliantly perceptive to the near-lunatic and barely comprehensible – has descended on the plays considered primarily as texts to be studied rather than as plays to be enjoyed, Shakespeare the player and man of the theatre has remained in the shadows. While literally millions of words have been devoted to authorial and textual problems, few have thought it worthwhile or necessary to treat in any detail of Shakespeare’s consecutive career as player, or the possible ways in which his experience as an actor may have influenced his writing. The situation that confronted Heminges and Condell in 1623 has thus been exactly reversed. The unacknowledged dramatist whose reputation they sought to promote in face of scholarly neglect has come to occupy nearly all of the frame while the player and man of the theatre whose memory they revered is relegated to the margins.

Does any of this really matter? True, we do not know for certain how good a player Shakespeare was and, for the most part, can only conjecture as to the roles that he played. Again, the art of the actor, however accomplished, and the art of the theatre in general of which he was undoubtedly a master, are essentially ephemeral and, to that extent, beyond our recall. In these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that his supreme achievement as dramatic poet, for which we have the firm evidence of the printed plays, is seen as of greater importance than any necessarily speculative estimate of his histrionic skills. But from an historical and biographical point of view, it is surely necessary to an adequate understanding of the period, the society in which he lived, and his place within it, to seek an authentic portrait of the man in the fullness of his being; and how can we hope to do this without taking due account of his professional occupation during much the greater part of his life – the occupation by which he was mainly known to his contemporaries? Rob a man of his profession or ‘quality’ (as the actor’s profession was termed in his time) and you rob him of an essential part of his identity. And this is perhaps more true of the actor than anyone else. But there is another objection to those who regard Shakespeare’s occupation as player as more or less peripheral to an appreciation of his genius as ‘poet, man of letters, and seer of life’; for, in attempting to separate the two – the man from his works, the works from the context and original purpose of their creation – you distort and obscure the meaning of the works themselves.

Here, precisely, is the vacuum that lies at the heart of so much biographical and academic writing about Shakespeare, past and present. And how deeply alienating it can be to those who are brought to approach his plays for the first time in preparing for school examinations, when the incomparable music of his verses is reduced to numbered, chopped-up parcels of dead learning. ‘Explain and discuss’!

Certainly, unless we place this fact of his occupation at the centre of our consideration of his life and works, we are left with an insoluble enigma; of how a well-educated but inexperienced young man from a small Warwickshire town with no theatrical background or training came to have such command of theatrical ways and means, such knowledge and understanding of the poetic and dramatic techniques of his predecessors and contemporaries as, in his earliest-known works, to have surpassed them in achievement and, in a few short years, gone on to write the greatest plays in the language.

To get to grips with the man himself, we have to go behind the literary legend, the invisible man of the Droeshout portrait and the Stratford monument; to make a big leap of historical imagination to put ourselves into that pre-literary, theatrical world that Shakespeare actually inhabited, when the words that he wrote in his London lodgings, or in the snatched intervals of repose on his visits home or on tour, were words to be acted, words for himself and his fellows to speak and be heard from a stage. This I attempt from the perspective of a fellow performer, a latter-day working actor, in the chapters that follow.

Notes

1.Schoenbaum, CDL, p. 315.

2.Quoted from Chambers, WS, II, pp. 228–30.

3.I am drawing here on Bentley, PDST, pp. 38–9.

4.Ibid., pp. 51–3.

5.Ibid., pp. 50–1.

6.For the harper-poets, see Southworth, EMM, chapters 3 and 7.

7.See H.C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End, Yale, 1946 (reprinted Anchor, 1967).

8.Quoted from Harrison’s Description of England in Shakspere’s Youth, ed. F.F. Furnivall with additions by Mrs C.C. Stopes, IV (Supplement, 1908), p. 367.

9.From Microcosmos in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. A.B. Grosart (1878), I, p. 82. Davies qualifies this statement in the next line with, ‘Yet generous yee are in minde and moode’.

10.Bentley describes the effect of the Jonson and Shakespeare folios on the reputation of dramatists as a rise ‘from an exceedingly low status to a moderately low one’; op. cit. (n. 3), p. 57. For the Bodleian copy referred to below, see Schoenbaum (n. 1), p. 315.

11.Letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford, 3rd edn, 1947), pp. 227–8.

12.Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Penguin, 1970), pp. 284–5.

13.As quoted by Kenneth Muir in Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies (1973) from Florence E. Hardy, Life of Thomas Hardy (1962), p. 341.

TWO

Killing the Calf

As all that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare, is – that he was born at Stratford upon Avon, – married and had children there, – went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays, – returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried, – I must confess my readiness to combat every unfounded supposition respecting the particular occurrences of his life.

George Steevens in a letter to Malone1

Half a century passed after Shakespeare’s death before anyone thought it worthwhile to publish an account of his life. In the meantime, the country had been torn apart by civil war, the theatres closed and destroyed, and the world he had known turned upside down. The first such account (too brief to be described as anything more than a biographical sketch) was that of Thomas Fuller in his History of the Worthies of England (1662). Though Shakespeare’s second daughter Judith had lived on until the Restoration, and there must then have been others in both Stratford and London who remembered him and would have been able to supply at least some outline of his early life and career, the normally assiduous Fuller appears to have taken little trouble to seek them out, and the half-page entry he devotes to Shakespeare in his Worthies is massively uninformative. He tells us correctly of his birth in Stratford but even the date of his death – for which he had only to glance at the monument in Holy Trinity church – is left a blank. In place of facts, he gives us generalities deriving from Jonson’s eulogy about his natural genius and ‘wood-notes wild’. Sketchy as it was, Fuller’s account remained the primary source for subsequent biographical entries in the seventeenth century.

John Aubrey’s random jottings, made around 1681, had to wait over two hundred years for publication as Brief Lives. They contain interesting scraps of information from various stages of Shakespeare’s life but, though conscientiously recorded, they had come to him only at second or third hand and are not to be taken at their face value. For example, on a visit to Stratford he was told by one of the locals that Shakespeare was the son of a butcher and had occasionally taken a turn at his father’s craft; ‘when he killed a calf’, his informant assured him, ‘he would do it in high style and make a speech’. We know now that William’s father, John Shakespeare, was in fact a glover by trade and in later life something of a general merchant in agricultural produce. That he was ever personally involved in the slaughter of cattle seems improbable, and that his young son was allowed to carry out the butchery himself (in whatever style) even less likely. Either Aubrey’s informant was having him on, or had picked up and misunderstood a genuine tradition from an earlier time, in which the act of killing a calf was mimicked in pantomime, or shadow play behind a curtain, by travelling showmen; a trick that William may have seen at a fair and performed for the amusement of his family and neighbours. There is a record from 1521 in the household accounts of Princess Mary (then six years old) of a ‘man of Windsor’ being rewarded for ‘killing of a calf before my Lady’s grace behind a cloth’.2 That the adult Shakespeare was familiar with it, we know from Hamlet where, in answer to Polonius’ boast that at university he had acted Julius Caesar and been killed in the Capitol, he has Hamlet reply, ‘It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there’ (III.ii.104) – an ironic anticipation of Polonius’ death behind a cloth – the arras behind which he has hidden to overhear the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude and through which he is killed by Hamlet’s rapier. Aubrey was seemingly unaware of this background to the story he tells: a testimony to his accuracy as a reporter but to nothing else. The anecdote contains a true statement but we have to put it back into its original context to know what it means.

To set the record straight, the slaughter of those animals whose skins were used in the glover’s trade (mainly pigs and goats) was the job of the butchers, whose shambles in Stratford was situated in Middle Row. Schoenbaum suggests that it was in visiting his uncle Henry’s farm in Snitterfield that William may have witnessed a scene that was to stay with him and return to his mind in writing Henry VI.3 Seeking an analogy to convey the young king’s distress at the arrest of ‘good Duke Humphrey’ which has just taken place in his presence, and anticipating the old man’s fate, he has Henry say of him that,

… as the butcher takes away the calf,

And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strains,

Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house;

Even so, remorseless, have they borne him hence;

And as the dam runs lowing up and down,

Looking the way her harmless young one went,

And can do nought but wail her darling’s loss;

Even so myself bewails good Gloucester’s case

With sad unhelpful tears, and with dimm’d eyes

Look after him, and cannot do him good …

(2 Henry VI, III.i.210–19)

If, as I later suggest, he was to play the part of Henry himself, these words would, at their first hearing, have come from his own lips. A later speech in the same play takes us into the shambles itself, for when Warwick is questioned about his suspicions as to the identity of the murderers, he asks in reply,

Who finds the heifer dead, and bleeding fresh,

And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,

But will suspect ’twas he that made the slaughter?

and goes on,

Who finds the partridge in the puttock’s nest,

But may imagine how the bird was dead,

Although the kite soar with unblooded beak?

(III.ii.187–92)

It is recollections such as these from Shakespeare’s upbringing in a small country town, and observations from nature in the country-side around it, that give life and substance to the more rhetorical passages in his early plays, and mark them as his own.

I need to say a little more at this point about William’s father. Deriving from yeoman stock in the nearby village of Snitterfield, John Shakespeare had moved to Stratford in about 1550. As we have seen, he was a glover and wittawer (dresser of soft leather) by trade. In the town his business had prospered so well that in the course of a few years he had been able to buy land and property, including the house in Henley Street that William was later to inherit. In 1559 he had married Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do local farmer with connections to a gentry family of the same name that could trace its Warwickshire roots to before the Norman conquest. William, their eldest son, had been born in April 1564; the day of the month is unknown, but he was baptised in the Stratford parish church of Holy Trinity on the 26th. By then, John had already recommended himself to the town elders as a suitable candidate for municipal office, and in 1557 was serving as ale-taster, the first of a series of minor posts that was to lead, in 1568, to his election as Bailiff or Mayor. Thereafter, he was always addressed as Master Shakespeare. Though he was Bailiff only for a year, and was not, like some of his fellow burgesses, re-elected to the office, he acted as Chamberlain (treasurer) in several years both before and after his mayoralty, and went on to serve the town as alderman for nearly two more decades.

We have no firm evidence relating to William’s education. Biographers mainly assume that he attended the King’s New School in Stratford, which occupied an upper chamber of the Guildhall (Plate 3). As tuition there was free to the sons of burgesses and it was not far from his home in Henley Street, it would have been the natural place for him to go. Contrary to anti-Stratfordian argu-ments, his schooling there would have been sufficient to provide at least an adequate basis for the classical learning he was later to exhibit in the plays. Ben Jonson, who is patronising in his eulogy about Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine and lesse Greek’, is known to have completed a similar course at Westminster School. Though, exceptionally, Jonson may have stayed on at Westminster a year or two longer, the normal age at which boys destined to go into one of the crafts or professions finished their grammar school education was fourteen or fifteen. At this age, William would have found himself in Stratford looking about for future employment. The year was 1578 or 1579.

Up to this time all had gone well with John Shakespeare and, as late as 1575, we learn of his extending his property in Henley Street by the purchase of an adjoining tenement with orchards and gardens; but between September 1576 and January 1577 something occurred that was to throw the current of his life completely off course. An application he had made to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms as ‘gentleman’ – an honour to which as former Bailiff of an incorporated town (one with a royal charter) he was fully entitled – was unaccountably abandoned. He was sued for debt, ceased to attend Council meetings, and failed to respond to repeated demands for payment of various dues and levies that were made upon him. Though treated with exceptional leniency by his Council colleagues, their patience finally ran out, and in 1586 two new aldermen were elected to take his place and that of another defaulter, because they did not ‘Come to the halles when they be warned nor hathe not done of Longe tyme’.4

It would be tiresome to the reader to rehearse here the several contradictory theories that have been advanced to account for this dramatic change in John Shakespeare’s fortunes. That they were at least in part religious is suggested by his inclusion in a list of those who failed to come monthly to church to receive Communion as the law required, and more explicitly by the discovery, after his death, of a ‘spiritual testament’ – a form of Catholic devotion originally composed by St Charles Borromeo of Milan – in the rafters of his Henley Street house. In this, among other evidence of his attachment to proscribed beliefs and forms of worship, he requests his friends and relations, ‘lest by reason of my sins I be to pass and stay a long while in Purgatory, they will vouchsafe to assist and succour me with their holy prayers and satisfactory works, especially with the holy sacrifice of the Mass …’.5 Printed copies of this document in English are known to have been brought from Milan and distributed in England by two Jesuit missionaries, Thomas Campion and Robert Persons, and both men are known to have passed through Warwickshire in 1580. Persons was entertained by Edward Arden, then head of the Arden family, at Park Hall; Campion by Sir William Catesby at Lapworth, for which Catesby was arrested and imprisoned in the Fleet.

The Elizabethan era has often been depicted retrospectively in rosy hues, but the England in which William grew up was riven by deep divisions and uncertainties in which politics and religion had become disastrously entangled; a time of plots and rumours, fears of foreign invasion and mounting paranoia, in which the unprincipled prospered while men of conscience such as Edward Arden could end up with their head stuck on the end of a pike on Tower Bridge. If John Shakespeare was indeed sympathetic to the old religion of his youth, he was treading a dangerous path.

Traditional accounts of William’s early life delay his entrance into the acting profession to as late as 1590, ‘or a few years earlier’, as one recent biographer vaguely puts it. But the craft of the player is not learnt in a day or even in a few years – a fact of which biographers in general and academics in particular appear blissfully unaware. In proposing that a mature young man in his middle twenties, with no previous training or experience, could come from the background I have indicated and, by 1592, advanced to a point where Henry Chettle (a man thoroughly versed in the ways of the theatre) could describe him in print as ‘exelent in the qualitie he professes’ (that of a player), and to have acquired a ‘facetious grace in writting, that aprooves his Art’,6 is to assume the impossible. It betrays both a degree of contempt for the player’s art and total disregard of theatrical conditions in the period, when the normal, if not invariable, routes of entry to the profession were either by patrimonial inherit-ance or apprenticeship at an early age (between ten and sixteen) to a senior member, usually a ‘sharer’, in one of the existing companies.

Richard Burbage followed his father into the Queen’s men. Edward Alleyn is said by Fuller in his Worthies to have been ‘bred a Stage-player’; his father was a London innkeeper and he may have begun his acting career playing minor roles with the companies that had used the inn for their performances. If we look at the list of ‘Principall Actors in all these Playes’ printed by Heminges and Condell at the front of their 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s Works (shown in Plate 1), we find that all those named of whose beginnings we have any information were involved in the apprenticeship system in one way or another – as masters or apprentices. Nicholas Tooley was Burbage’s apprentice. In his will of 1605, Augustine Phillips bequeathed a legacy to Samuel Gilburne, ‘my late apprentice’. John Rice was John Heminges’ boy when, in 1607, he performed for James I at a Merchant Taylors’ dinner; Alexander Cooke also acknowledged Heminges as his master. Robert Gough is first recorded playing a female role in The Seven Deadly Sins in about 1590/1; Thomas Pope, who remembered Gough in his will of 1603, was probably his master. Robert Armin had begun as apprentice to a London goldsmith and is reputed to have been encouraged as a ‘wag’ by Queen Elizabeth’s jester and player, Tarlton, who prophesied that he should ‘enjoy my clownes sute after me’, which in course of time he did. Of the twenty-six actors named, only William Ostler, Nathan Field, John Underwood and Richard Robinson are known to have entered the profession in any other way, and that was as singing boys in one of the royal chapels or children’s companies.7 Nor is there a single player in the whole period known to have been accepted into any of the companies in his early to middle twenties without previous training or experience, as is supposed of Shakespeare.

If apprenticeship was the normal pattern of recruitment for those boys and adolescents who had not been ‘bred to the stage’, as the evidence suggests, there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare, for all his later renown as poet and dramatist, would, as a player, have been treated any differently to other boys of his class and education, or would not have been obliged to climb the same arduous ladder to advancement.

The hoary legend of the young Shakespeare stealing a deer from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy and so arousing the enmity of its owner that he was ‘oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London’, as propagated by Nicholas Rowe in 1709,8 was demolished by Edmond Malone in his uncompleted Life published by Boswell in 1821;9 that it survives at all in subsequent biographies may be due to its usefulness in absolving authors from the painful task of explaining how it came about that the gentle Shakespeare they like to depict could have brought himself to abandon his wife and young family without visible means of support in pursuance of his late-developing histrionic ambitions. But of course there is no real evidence that he did anything of the kind. The dates of his marriage to Anne Hathaway and births of their three children have no relevance to the time of his first departure from Stratford. ‘All they prove’, as John Dover Wilson pointed out, ‘is that he must have been at home about August 1582, nine months before the birth of Susanna; in November of the same year for his marriage; and once again in the early summer of 1584, nine months before the birth of the twins’, and, because it was in the summer that plays were normally suspended in London because of the plague, ‘the dates referred to do not at all forbid us supposing Shakespeare to have been already a professional player at this period’.10 Indeed, the fact of his marriage in 1582 gives added support to the hypothesis I am putting forward, for whereas it is easily understandable that an unencumbered boy of fifteen or sixteen should have entered the profession of his choice after completing his grammar school education a year or so earlier, as was normal in the period, it is far from easy to envisage circumstances that might have induced him to do so as a mature young man with family responsibilities.

Nor was there any lack of opportunity for him to have taken that step at the earlier age, for companies of players had been visiting Stratford from 1569 onwards, when he was five, and continued to come there throughout the whole period of his boyhood and adolescence. As troubles came upon him from 1576 onwards, John Shakespeare would have had good reason for wishing his son away from the town and, as alderman and justice, he was ideally placed to facilitate his engaging himself to one of their senior men. For we know that all such players’ apprenticeships – whether effected by a simple contract of service or more formal indentures requiring the seal of some regulatory third party11 – were concluded, not with the company as a constituent body, but with an individual ‘sharer’ by agreement of his fellows. For the sharers – those who had invested in the company’s capital stock of costumes, props and playbooks – ‘were the company, and all the others in the troupe merely their employees’.12 It is true that no record survives of William having been apprenticed in this way; nor are we given any later hint as to the company or player concerned, the payment of a premium, or the nature and term of his engagement. But neither are we afforded any other reliable information about him at the time and, if William’s recruitment and subsequent life as an apprentice player remains a blank, the same is true of the vast majority of other boys of his age recruited into one or other of the numerous companies of players then on the road. By examining the Stratford records of those companies known to have visited the town in the period, it may however still be possible, by process of elimination, to arrive at a working hypothesis as to the one he had joined, and that in turn may lead us to the identity of the player whose responsibility it would have been to instruct him in the rudiments of his craft. Though based only in probabilities, such an investigation is unlikely to remain for long in the dark for, by following the footsteps of that company and player through their subsequent histories so far as these are known to us, we shall be able to test our conjectures by the destination to which they take us. If they bring us to a point where Shakespeare is known to have been when he first emerges from obscurity to public notice in the early 1590s, we shall have confirmation that we have been on the right track from the start. Even if it should later transpire that we have taken a wrong turning in the course of the journey, the attempt will still have been worth making if it suggests a more credible alternative – a more possible process of climbing – than the impossible leap to eminence with which we are usually presented.

Notes

1.Quoted from Schoenbaum, SL, p. 120.

2.Letters and Papers of Henry VIII (HMSO), III, Part 2, p. 1100.

3.Schoenbaum, CDL, p. 74.

4.Fripp, III, p. 170.

5.Quoted from Schoenbaum, CDL, p. 47.

6.Quoted from Chambers, WS, II, p. 189.

7.I have been drawing here on the actors’ biographies in Chambers, ES, II, pp. 295–350. See also Bentley’s study of apprenticeship in PPST. Professor Bentley writes (p. 122): ‘there is no doubt that the acting troupes used the apprentice system to train and hold their boy actors’.

8.Shakespeare, Works, ed. Rowe (1709), I, p. v.

9.Shakespeare, Works, ed. Malone (1821), II, Section IX. Malone concludes (p. 166): ‘All these circumstances decidedly prove, in my apprehension, that this anecdote is a mere fiction… . It is, I think, much more probable, that his own lively disposition made him acquainted with some of the principal performers who visited Stratford … and that there he first determined to engage in that profession.’

10.John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 42–3.

11.For the distinction between the two, see Chambers, WS, II, pp. 84–5.

12.Bentley, PPST, p. 26.

THREE

The Apprentice

… when we find a man of thirty already near the top of his particular tree, we must assume some previous climbing.

John Dover Wilson1

The date at which troupes of travelling players first included Stratford in their itineraries is not precisely known but, interestingly, the first such visitors to be recorded came there in 1568/9,2 the year in which John Shakespeare served as Bailiff. Was he instrumental in bringing them there?

The first to arrive were the Queen’s players – not the more famous company brought together by Walsingham in 1583 of which Richard Tarlton, Elizabeth’s jester, was the star attraction – but an earlier troupe she had inherited from Edward VI and Queen Mary of which little is known. That was in the summer of 1569. A month or so later came Worcester’s men, who looked for protection as patron to William Somerset who had succeeded to his title as third earl of Worcester in 1548 and lived until 1589. Protection was needed from the vagrancy laws and within a few years was to become an absolute necessity with the passing of the Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds in 1572 which, among other things, laid down that ‘all Fencers Bearewards Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towards any other honorable Personage of greater Degree … shalbee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacabounds and Sturdy Beggers … to be grevously whipped’.3

The procedure followed by the players on their arrival in incor-por-ated towns where they hoped to perform, is well set out by a man called Willis, written much later when he was aged seventy-five but relating back to the time of his boyhood in the late 1560s or early ’70s in Gloucester.

In the City of Gloucester the manner is (as I think it is in other like corporations) that when Players of Enterludes come to towne, they first attend the Mayor to enforme him what noble-mans servants they are, and so to get licence for their publike playing; and if the Mayor like the Actors, or would shew respect to their Lord and Master, he appoints them to play their first play before himselfe and the Aldermen and common Counsell of the City; and that is called the Mayors play, where every one that will comes in without money, the Mayor giving the players a reward as hee thinks fit to shew respect unto them. At such a play, my father tooke me with him and made mee stand betweene his leggs, as he sate upon one of the benches, where wee saw and heard very well.4

Normally, as at both Gloucester and Stratford, the ‘mayor’s play’ was given in the ‘town house’ or guildhall. As we shall discover later, admission to this first performance was not everywhere free to the public as Willis tells us it was in Gloucester, and in many towns even councillors were expected to contribute to the reward. If the play was approved and received a licence, further public perform-ances followed – usually in the guildhall as before or, if that was not available, in a nearby inn. At these subsequent shows, attendance was charged in the form of a ‘gathering’ to which everyone present was expected to contribute.

At the tender age of five, the young Shakespeare may have been too young to stand between his father’s legs as Willis had done; but as the Queen’s and Worcester’s men were succeeded by Leicester’s in 1573 and Warwick’s in 1575, we can be reasonably sure he was there in the Guildhall (with or without his father) to see and enjoy their plays.

From the point of view of William’s joining one of these companies, the crucial period is between 1577 when he was thirteen and starting his last year or two of studies at the King’s school, and 1580 when he was sixteen and had already left. Worcester’s and Leicester’s men were both to make return visits to the town in 1575/6, and Worcester’s were there again at or around Christmas 1577 and at the same time of year in 1580. Derby’s came in 1578/9, and three other companies – those of Lord Strange, Lord Berkeley and the Countess of Essex – in that or the following year. Of these six, three can be eliminated fairly easily. The visit of Leicester’s troupe (probably in October 1576) is a little too early as William would then have been only twelve, and it was not to return until 1586/7, which is far too late. Berkeley’s makes only rare appearances in the records elsewhere and sinks from view altogether in the vital period between 1586/7 and 1597. The Countess of Essex had inherited a company of players on her husband’s death as recently as September 1576, but this is unlikely to have survived for long after 1579 when her secret marriage to Leicester was revealed to the Queen.5 At first sight, the related troupes of the Earl of Derby and that of his son and heir, Ferdinando Lord Strange, offer the most promising alternatives as William’s choice of company because of the connection with Strange’s that he is known to have had in the early 1590s at the Rose and elsewhere; but Derby’s men were to go into limbo in the upheavals of 1583, and the Strange’s company of 1590–2 had little, if any, connection (apart from its patron) with the one that had visited Stratford and, in the 1580s, appears to have specialised in acrobatic displays at court for the Queen.